Street Shadows

by Jerald Walker

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Not much,” I whispered. “What’s up with you?”

  “We got some good weed,” he said. “Me, Zack, and Louis.” Over Greg’s shoulder I saw legs and shoes, all but submerged in the darkness. “Come on out.”

  I thought of my father, how angry he had been, and I knew I needed to lay low for a while. “Naw,” I said. “I’m cool.”

  “Come on, man. Just for a little while.”

  “I’m cool,” I said.

  “What you doing in there, reading again, like a white boy?”

  I got dressed. After pushing a chair beneath the window, I hoisted myself up and climbed outside, because my friends, after all, had expectations too.

  CAPTAIN WALKER

  From my office window I watched a heavy snowfall, and it reminded me of a similar storm on the night of Greg’s murder. He was the first of my childhood friends to die young, but we all expected to do the same. I was surprised when I reached twenty, amazed to see twenty-five. Then I was twenty-eight, thirty, thirty-five, and now forty, a college professor living far from Chicago’s killing fields, but I still had not been able to shake the feeling that a violent, premature death was my due. And so I knew, long before Brenda suspected it, that one of my students intended to kill me.

  His name was Sheng. I had met him four months earlier when he enrolled in my freshman composition course, though I do not know how he passed the placement exam because his writing was so poor. He was of Chinese descent and his accent was heavy, even though he’d been born and raised here in Massachusetts. I had pictured Boston’s Chinatown when he told me this, even imagined him busing tables in some restaurant, above which an elderly aunt gazed pensively through her apartment window, remembering Beijing. But he lived in Easton with his mother. Easton was not particularly known for its Asian population. They may have been the only two—originally four, but his father abandoned them years ago, and his brother was dead.

  “Tell me more,” I said, “about your brother.”

  Sheng pointed the barrel of an index finger at his forehead, pulled the trigger. “Suicide,” he said.

  We were in my office, where he had accompanied me after the first class. My window was open and the clatter of the adjacent building’s air conditioner made it difficult to hear. Closing the window was not an option, though, because there was no a/c in our building. The room’s temperature had to be over one hundred. We were drenched in sweat.

  “Twenty-three years old,” Sheng continued. “A medical student. But he was under too much pressure. Success is very important to our mother. Maybe that’s why our father left. He wasn’t very successful.” He looked at his watch, rose, and then picked up his backpack and slipped it over his frail shoulders. As he turned to leave, the pictures on my bookshelf caught his eye. He picked one up; it was of my family on the day of Dorian’s birth. Brenda is holding him, and I am sitting next to her on the hospital bed with Adrian, then two, on my lap. I smiled as I recalled that extraordinary day, just three months before. I looked at Sheng; he was smiling, too. He asked me my sons’ names. After I told him, he replaced the photo and asked, “Is success very important to you, Captain Walker?”

  “Sure,” I replied, “to an extent.”

  He smiled at me. “Captain Walker, did you get good grades in college?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “You’re very smart, Captain Walker.”

  “Sheng?”

  “Yes, Captain Walker?”

  “Why are you calling me that?”

  “What?”

  “Captain Walker.”

  “Because,” he said with a grin, “you control my destiny.”

  • • •

  Three weeks later I gave him a D on the first assignment, the lowest grade of the class. At the bottom of the page, I penned a note asking him to see me after class. I wanted to talk to him about ways he could improve his writing. He wanted to talk about trucks. “Does Adrian like eighteen-wheelers?” he had just asked me.

  “Not particularly,” I said, impressed by his thoughtfulness; he had remembered my older son’s name after hearing it only once before.

  “I’ll bring him some trucks he’ll like.” Sheng opened his backpack and put in his paper. “Long red ones,” he continued, nodding. “With little firemen inside. Little hoses.”

  Students from the next class began streaming into the room. I rose from my chair and stuffed papers in my briefcase. As Sheng and I walked toward the door, I mentioned his poor grade. “You didn’t do very well,” I told him. “Mainly grammatical errors, but there were some structural problems, too.” He nodded. I suggested that he visit the writing studio. “They can help with some basics,” I explained.

  Sheng responded, “I’ll bring you something chewy.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Maybe a chewy rattle? Good for strong teeth. Does Dorian have teeth yet, Captain Walker?”

  I laughed. “Sheng, he’s barely three months old.”

  “I had teeth at birth. Six. My father gave me a chewy rattle. I don’t know where my father is now, but I know where a chewy rattle is for Dorian. Maybe he’ll have teeth soon.”

  “I don’t need any trucks or rattles, Sheng, but I do need you to visit the writing studio.”

  “I will, Captain Walker.”

  “Good.”

  “Captain Walker?”

  “Yes?”

  He stared at me intently for several seconds. “To go to medical school, I need an excellent grade in your class.”

  “All the more reason,” I responded, “to visit the writing studio.”

  If he followed this advice, it had no positive effect; his writing seemed to get worse instead of better. By the sixth week of class, it was clear to me that he would fail. That was also around the time he started following me. Several days a week, I would leave a class and find him waiting in the hall. As he escorted me to my next class or my office, we would chitchat about writing, his other courses, or the weather, but one day he mentioned his mother. She was in the hospital, he told me. I inquired about the nature of her illness. He said, “Whistling sounds.”

  “Whistling sounds?”

  He whistled. “Like that.”

  “What about them?”

  “She hears them all the time. But no one else can.”

  Early November arrived with the threat of a nor’easter. The first time I had heard this term was a year earlier, when we moved to New England. A weatherman issued dire warnings about its approach and I took him very seriously, having been born and raised in a city where the snow was a killer. Chicago’s blizzard of 1978 took over one hundred lives, and one before that, in 1963, took sixty, including my uncle James, who had disappeared the night of the storm and was not found for three months, when the thaw exposed him facedown on a curb, missing a shoe. For twenty-five years, I was convinced that this was the world’s worst weather, and then I moved to Iowa City where every spring tornadoes sent us fleeing to the basement in terror. After one direct hit to our town, Brenda and I walked the streets like war refugees, dazed and disoriented, stumbling over roof shingles and ducking beneath the roots of great trees. I had thought, then, of all the places I had never lived, and wondered what terrible meteorological deeds they had in store.

  “Any idea what the weather is like in China?” I asked Sheng.

  “Very good,” he said, “if you like tsunamis.”

  We were being pushed along by a strong wind. For the first thirty minutes of my composition class, I had been glancing out the window and watching the skies grow darker and trees twist and turn, until finally I dismissed the students early so we could escape the storm. I had doubted I would make it across campus before the deluge, but after five minutes of brisk walking, accompanied as I so often was during that period by Sheng, I was still dry and my office building was just across the street, tucked within a sea of rippling ivy. Now, if I could just get rid of Sheng. “I have to go to a meeting,” I anno
unced, “so I’ll see you in class tomorrow.” I looked at him to gauge his reaction, but it was impossible to see. He was wearing an enormous parka, the hood zipped to his nose, his face, from my side view, entirely concealed in a circle of fur, though it was fifty degrees outside.

  “Captain Walker,” he began, “do you like Chinese food?”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe Brenda likes it too?”

  I had never told him her name. I stopped walking. So did he. For a second we just stood there, facing each other. “My mother is crazy,” he continued, “but she’s a good cook. I’ll have her make something special for Brenda. Peking duck, only no duck. Too expensive. Maybe Brenda will like Peking chicken.”

  “Look, Sheng—”

  “Can’t talk now, Captain Walker. You have a meeting.” He darted across the street, nearly being hit by a sedan.

  My next class was not for another hour. I had gotten very little sleep the night before because both of my sons were sick, and so when I reached my office I closed and locked my door, pulled the shade, and settled in for a quick nap. I dreamed that I was dreaming, and when, in my dream, I woke and lifted my head from my desk, Sheng was sitting across from me reading a magazine. I forced myself awake. My heart was pounding. For a few seconds I did not know where I was, and then my surroundings began to make sense. I laughed out loud.

  I laughed again that night when I told Brenda my dream. We had just put the boys to bed and were in our study, preparing the next day’s classes. “This is getting ridiculous,” she said.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing? You’re dreaming about him.”

  “You don’t dream about your students?”

  She looked at me incredulously, still gullible, I thought, after all these years. I smiled. She frowned and said, “There’s nothing funny about being stalked.”

  “There’s something funny about everything.”

  “You need to tell the campus police.”

  I shook my head. “It’s just Sheng.”

  “He could be dangerous.”

  By then I knew that he was. I knew, in my gut, that he wanted to kill me. “More needy,” I said, “than dangerous.”

  She looked up from her computer. “How do you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” she replied, and then she began telling me about some high school girlfriend and her deranged lover. I was happy when the phone rang and interrupted the story. Let it be a real diversion, I thought, and not just a telemarketer. I looked at the caller ID. My face, Brenda later told me, lost its color.

  The conversation was brief. Sheng wanted to know if he was going to get an A. I told him no. I asked him not to call me at home. For two weeks he did not. He also did not attend classes. His mother had gotten worse, he explained when he did phone, and she needed his constant care, though I could not imagine what that could be. Perhaps he cupped her ears when the whistling started, or raised the volume on the television. I left assignments for him in a bin outside my office door, which he completed faithfully, but his writing did not improve. And he started calling me again. Each time his name appeared on the caller ID, I would pick up the receiver and settle it back on its base. It would ring again. I would let the answering machine get it. If he called back I would unplug the jack. One night, I had just completed this ritual and returned to the kitchen table when Brenda said, “If you don’t notify the police, I will.”

  I moved my fork across my plate, gathering the last of my pasta.

  “He’s unstable.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He could murder you.”

  I did not reply.

  “It’s almost like … like you want him to.”

  I looked up from my food. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Then why don’t you report him?”

  “What’s to report?” I asked. “He’s just working through some problems.”

  “Apparently,” she said, “so are you.”

  He called the next day and this time I picked up the phone. “You’ve got to stop this,” I told him.

  “We need to talk, Captain Walker. If you have a minute.”

  “I don’t have a minute.”

  “Maybe you’re putting Adrian and Dorian to bed?”

  I did not answer.

  “Or maybe you’re washing dishes with Brenda?”

  “What do you want, Sheng?”

  “An excellent grade, Captain Walker.”

  “You’re not getting an A. You’ll be lucky to pass.”

  “We should talk about it some more.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Go ahead, Sheng. Talk.”

  “Not now. Tomorrow. In your office. One o’clock?”

  “Fine, “I said. “One o’clock.”

  “It won’t take long,” he assured me. “Two minutes.”

  I hung up and went into the den. Brenda was reading. She looked up from her book. “Who called?” she asked.

  I said, “My mom.”

  I had never wanted a physical barrier in my office between my students and me, and so soon after my hire I had pushed my desk to one side and placed a rocker in the center of the room. Sheng sat there now. The only thing separating us was his backpack, which rested at his feet. “I’ve tried my best,” he was saying. “I’ve worked very, very hard.”

  “I know.”

  He squinted at me. “Maybe you don’t know. You got good grades in school. It was easy for you.”

  “Nothing,” I said, “was easy for me.”

  He lifted his backpack to his lap and let his hand rest on the zipper. I scooted to the edge of my chair. He released the zipper momentarily to scratch his chin. There was talking in the hall. I looked up to see three colleagues walking by, bundled up in hats and puffy coats. I glanced toward my window; snow rushed past as a nor’easter raged on, and here I thought of my friend Greg, of the fact that his murder, like the murder of any black male in the ghetto, was normal. But, I reminded myself, I was somewhere else now. I looked back at Sheng; he was staring intensely at Dorian’s birthday picture, as he had the day we met, and I decided I wanted him out of my office. I said his name. He started to open his bag. I reached forward and stopped him, clutching a fistful of canvas.

  “I have something for you.”

  “Just tell me what it is,” I said.

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “I don’t like surprises.”

  His body went slack, but he did not let go of the bag, and neither did I. I asked him to put it on the floor. He reluctantly agreed. We lowered it together. I released it after him, and then, after a brief silence, asked about his mother.

  He sighed deeply. “She wants money. I need a summer job. Can you get me a summer job, Captain Walker?”

  I hesitated for a second, trying to formulate a distraction. “I think so. Maybe. Yes.”

  His eyes narrowed. “For real?”

  “I think our counseling services can find one for you. If you explain your situation thoroughly. That means telling them everything you’ve told me: your mother’s whistling sounds, your brother’s suicide, your father, your anxiety about good grades, everything.”

  “This will get me a summer job?”

  “Yes.” Keeping an eye on his backpack, I found my campus directory beneath a pile of papers and dialed student counseling. When someone answered, I told her who I was and that I had a student with me who needed their services. I handed Sheng the phone. Their conversation lasted several minutes, Sheng becoming increasingly agitated, especially when talking about his mother. Just before hanging up, I heard him agree to go to their office, conveniently located in the same building as mine, if I would accompany him. “Ready?” I asked. He nodded and reached for his backpack, but I got to it first. Gesturing toward the door, I said, “After you.”

  The counseling services were tucked discreetly in a corner of the basement. We walked down the stairs and found the receptionist waiting for u
s in the hall. She led us to a small room with two couches and a table full of magazines. Before leaving she handed Sheng a clipboard with a form attached. He handed it to me. I read him the questions and wrote down his responses. A short while later, we were joined by the counselor, who was also of Chinese descent, a coincidence that seemed destined to work in our favor. She introduced herself, shook our hands, and then asked Sheng to follow her. He turned to me. “I see you later, Captain Walker,” he said, and perhaps this is true. Perhaps one day I will walk into a classroom and see him in the front row, or as I wait in line in the cafeteria to pay for a sandwich, his hand will clutch my shoulder, or early some morning, when I enter my kitchen to make coffee, I will find him there. But so far I have not seen him since I left him with the counselor, who determined that he was an immediate threat to himself and to me. He was rushed to a nearby hospital for an emergency psychiatric evaluation. They admitted him against his will.

  POOP

  After telling me he’d stolen a car, Jimmy reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills that, through the prism of my inebriation and poverty, I estimated to be five grand. He handed me a twenty and stuffed the rest in his pocket. “Me and my homey got two hundred each,” he said. “Chopped up a Lincoln and sold the parts. I’m going to do it again tonight. Want to come?”

  I did. I had developed a serious appetite for cocaine and, other than what money I got from petty thievery and selling a little pot now and then, I did not have a steady income. But I’d been drinking all day and was in no shape to go. I smoked some pot instead and went to bed early.

  I dreamed I was in a subway station. My bed was in the center of the platform and crowds of people moved past me in streams. It was noisy and chaotic, terrible conditions for sleeping, so I decided to leave. I sat up and looked for the exit when a cop suddenly appeared before me. He said, “You’re under arrest.”